Roger Corman Quotes

Now, after 18 years, not a sign of Lovecraft in my work.

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

My advice to young film-makers is this: don't follow trends, start them!

I'm a big fan of suspense and tension filmmaking, and that was my goal with 'The Conjuring.'

Horror is one of the few genres that allows you to explore areas in film that normally you wouldn't otherwise.

The Shining' is one of the few horror movies that I actually like and it actually scared me.

I'm disregarding all the rules I've seen as people approach writing music. I'm trying to break them.

It takes someone like Ram Gopal Varma to change the norms, bend the rules, shake convention, and come up with something like 'Road.'

Men of strong minds and who think for themselves, should not be discouraged on finding occasionally that some of their best ideas have been anticipated by former writers; they will neither anathematize others nor despair themselves. They will rather go on discovering things before discovered, until they are rewarded with a land hitherto unknown, an empire indisputably their own, both right of conquest and of discovery.

I don't think it's a mistake to put every great idea into the first movie, because I've always said there won't be a second movie if you go 'we'll hold back these ideas for another one.

We only do what we think is good and what we're happy with. I do that in stand-up, I even do it with my children's books. I don't do market research, I don't have focus groups, I don't care. I don't care if it fails, honestly. I'd rather have something that's completely mine fail than something succeed that I'm not proud of.

I did The Fifth Element and [Jean-Claude] Mezieres, the artist of Valerian; he was working on Fifth Element. And he's actually the one who say, why don't you do Valerian? And I said because we can't make it. And you really have to wait for Avatar and to suddenly think oh okay, maybe we can think of it. But before Avatar, just forget it.

The way I'm doing it is I'm trying to think to myself, "Okay, I have the name Superman, and he's going to be a guy that deserves the name 'Superman.' I'm trying to forget about Krypton, about The Daily Planet what would I do if I was thinking it up?" I can do it any way at all..I can make him an Eskimo midget who's toothless and blind... I can do anything. It's difficult .

All of my films have been very hard to understand at the script stage because they're very different. At the time I did them they were not conventional. The executives could only think in terms of what they'd already seen. It's hard for them to think in terms of what has never been done before.

Creativity means learning where the rules exist, and then breaking them! Saying, "It's better this way." But you have to know the rules in order to break them with any grace.

I think that it was a great advantage to go into photography not knowing much about it. Not thinking. I think one of the problems with many photographers today is that they never see for themselves, but just like everybody else.

I think being in a place where there is nothing happening is very inspiring because you have to make your own fun, you are not reliant on imitating any other bands.

Nobody knows what will work until they try it. Some of comics' biggest success stories in recent years have explored subjects that no one was writing about at the time - stories no one had any reason to think would succeed. My advice? Write what you want to read. You'll have more fun doing it - and if all else fails, you'll always have at least one loyal reader.

I don't think I was ever thinking critically about my aesthetic, I think it's enough when you're little just to understand that you can give yourself the permission to try and see things differently or create something original, even though you probably won't make anything original for a really long time.

We do not want to repeat ourselves [in Doctor Strange] or do what's been done before necessarily, and when you have a track record now you can either do that and keep, this seems to work and let's keep doing this - which some people accuse us of no matter what, because I don't think they pay attention, but really what we do is say, 'Okay, we have a studio that trusts us and let's us do what we want for the most part with the creative.

I know a famous violinist who told me he can't compose because he knows too many pieces. So, when he starts thinking of a note, an existing piece immediately comes to mind. Just starting out, one of your biggest strengths is not knowing how things are supposed to be.

You've got to concentrate on the business of entertaining and writing songs. Always think different from the next person. Don't ever do a song as you heard somebody else do it.

Street skating, which is what I grew up with, is completely free of rules. You can do anything. When I see a skater go by, I think, What is this person going to do here? It's the same with people who write, who make music, who draw, who make movies. Creative people tend to have all of those different avenues in them.

I think that horror fiction is one of the ways to approach these problems of death.

It's impossible for me to feel like there's only one way to do a thing. There's nothing wrong with having one way of doing it, but I think it's a bad habit. I believe in range. Like, there's a lot of tunes that I play all the time-sometimes I hear 'em in a different register. And if you don't have complete freedom, or you won't let yourself get away from that one straight line, oh, my goodness, that's too horrible to even think about.